After that, I sat with Nefarious and Caitlin for pictures next to the fire station (but not with Dave, who also joined the three of us), where Nefarious chatted up the fireman, got a sticker (the same sticker that she’s eagerly gotten every year I think), and climbed through a fire engine.

We spent lots of time in the petting zoo… I’m certain this is my favorite area by far and I had so much fun just sitting on the ground next to the goat pen and feeding them, first with treats that I bought, and then with treats that I scavenged from the floor — they eat so eagerly (and competitively) that half the food gets dropped outside the pens where they can’t reach it. Even if you didn’t have food, a couple of the gleefully desperate goats would gladly fantasize that you had food as they licked your hands silly. I could have spent the whole day there, and just loved spending time with the goats, sheep, alpaca, llamas, pigs, and all the other barnyard critters.

Since she’s 48″ this year, it’s the first season that Nefarious can go on nearly every ride on her own, and she definitely took advantage of that and braved a ton of exciting ones, as well as old favorites like running through the funhouses over and over and over. It’s totally nuts that people spend $5 for a single 45 second walk (not that fairs are known for being devoid of rip-offs), but Nefarious had a ride-all-day pass and it was worth every cent (although I saw some very angry parents of short kids who’d spent the $36 for that bracelet, realizing after the fact that their child was too short for most rides). While she enjoyed the rides I played policeman and reminded smokers that their act was not permitted… I was expecting rude refusals, but everyone was begrudgingly polite and put out their cigarettes. A much better action than getting annoyed and taking passive-aggressive photos as usual.

Then when we got home six hours later (we took transit, which is much easier than driving given the heavy Toronto traffic and the potential parking issues — cost and availability), I had a nice surprise in the mail, two shirts from Tee Fury — that’s a site that posts a new cheap t-shirt every day, that’s available for one day only. A lot of junk gets posted, but I still check daily, and have snagged a half dozen or so this year when they struck my fancy. Here’s what I got today:

Tomorrow I’m sure we’ll all have sore legs — I think this is Caitlin’s third day in a row of marathon walks, in addition to her work at the gym — so I imagine activity will be limited to heading down to the pool for a lengthy swim. Fingers crossed for cold and windy weather, which fools my body into believing the unheated water is much warmer than it actually is. Definitely do some carving as well — it’s just been such a huge pleasure rediscovering how much I enjoy fabrication of all types, and creating with my hands as much as my mind, which is where the balance usually leans toward.

We had a bread knife “go bad”. It’s kind of hard to explain, but what I think happened is that the rubber absorbed dishwashing liquid (probably due to being left sitting in water) and then started to break down, becoming a sort of crumbly goo. Caitlin threw it out but I rescued it from the garbage. Originally the plan was just to cut off the gross bits to make it usable, but Nefarious volunteered to fabricate a completely new handle. I’ll explain the reason in a moment, but this is the Sword Dagger of Godric Gryffindor, an “inspired by” replica she made after printing out photos of the movie prop.

The reason she made that is as part of an ongoing series of cutlery that she dreamed up. Although there may be variations, there’s a knife, fork, and spoon for each Hogwarts house founder from the Harry Potter series — Gryffindor as I already mentioned, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, and Slytherin. When I post the final version of this stuff after they’re finished, I’ll include the really cool drawings she’s made of them. I’m really happy to see her drawing out plans and diagrams, so I’m totally encouraging it by helping out. Anyway, this one here are the salad utensils of Salazar Slytherin. Obviously they’re just roughed out so far, and there’s still a lot of carving, sanding, and oiling still to do.

As I said, there really is such a satisfaction in creating things that are tangible, and in addition to my own self indulgence I think that it’s important that Nefarious sees me making things (although her patience for the sounds of grinding is wearing very thin), and then valuing and enjoying them more than some analogous object bought at a store. By the way, if you’d like some other views of my glorious skoon or spull or skulloon or spookull or whatever, here you go.

That said, it is a huge improvement over past sleeping and waking stunts including writing on my face with a marker (which was achieved at least once without waking me), putting my hand into a bowl of warm water, and worst of all, splashing me in the face with a cup of cold water.

Before you write her off as the world’s worst kid, the last prank, the only one that moves from funny into cruel, was done at my request, because I wanted to know what it felt like — and it really is strange… hard to explain, I think because it takes your brain a moment to put an explanations to the sensations, so while it’s doing that, you get to feel the raw moment, free of context. Try it.

Our doorbell, as you can seeing photo five below (bottom center), is an exposed piece of metal because it’s missing the panel and button. I’m sure this is the reason why we often receive delivery notices on the door, but the driver doesn’t bother to ring — they’re worried that if they push it, they’ll be electrocuted. So one of today’s project was creating a new enclosure. I carved it out of oak, which is nice because it’s really hard, but not so nice because it’s so tough and stringy that it can have trouble holding fine detail unless you work slowly. Anyway, going through the photos below in order:

1. The freshly carved pieces, both from a single piece of 3/4″ thick oak. The button has a lip as well as a raised numeral “5″ (our address), and the box (which is carved, not built) just has a matching round hole for the button.
2. I stained the box with a weak cappuccino tint and outlined the button hole with primary yellow. The button is stained with a mix of sesame tint and whitewash, and the raised number five is painted with rubine red and fluorescent pink.
3. Here’s how it looks like from the back. There’s no hardware holding the two pieces together since the pressure from the switch holds it in position (although it can rotate — if this was a concern it would have been easy to carve slots to limit the movement).
4. This is what the DIY wooden doorbell enclosure looks like over top of the original naked switch. Definitely a big improvement, and a lot less scary for postmen. We tested it (it fit and worked perfectly) before permanently affixing it.
5. Here’s the wooden doorbell button and the electrical switch. You can see why it worried people! So after a year of delivery issues, it was either this or a pleading note and “anti-warning”.
6. I realized that I should waterproof it, so I finished it with a clear gloss layer, which darkened it and brought out the grain as well as making it shiny.

I’m pretty happy with how it turned out, and it was a lot of fun to create something physical. I’ve created plenty of impressive virtual items — writing and online media and software and so on — but it’s never as satisfying as that which you can hold in your hands.

It’s been rainy today and yesterday, so the pool was closed keeping us home. That meant a lot of reading, which yesterday included — no joke — four and a half hours of The Deathly Hallows. Today we wrapped up with the chapter following the death of Harry Potter, so all that’s left for tomorrow is one last chapter and the epilogue. The last three books have all been video taped as well, so in addition to memories, I hope Nefarious will enjoy me reading to an age seven version of her many decades into the future.

While I was thinking about carving articulated dolls or marionettes or ventriloquists’ dummies out of wood, I doodled this ball joint. I wanted to see how hard it would be to carve a perfect sphere and its matching reverse, split into two halves, and was happy to discover that there was nothing to it. This wasn’t hand whittled or filed by the way. It was done with a Dremel clone (which I have oh-so-missed using every day when I was still a jeweler). That said, doing it with a file or knife wouldn’t be any harder. It would simply be more time consuming. While I’m mentioning tools, the enclosure and button up in the long photo sequence above was carved with my Carvewright (a computer controlled router) using just a 1/8″ bit (the others are misplaced), cuts and carving, and then finished with the Dremel.

Pardon the dirty nails (apologies to Caitlin for that most of all, who has suffered the worst for me) and hairs and so on. Eww, oh for the days when this sort of thing was invisible because a high resolution camera managed at best 640×480 and no one blinked when your 320×240 memories were smaller than the animated GIFs surrounding them. I’m sure there are still photos of Caitlin and I from back then since one of Stainless’s customers was a Kodak engineer or something and brought us toys, but I digress.

Considering some political art, I’ve been thinking about building a 3:1 scale (as in three times real size) handgun out of wood. Every piece would be shaped exactly like in a real gun, but it would be wood. Of course this would be a legal model, but it would show how making a functioning gun at home is getting easier and easier, and that one day fairly soon we’ll be able to “print out” a machine-gun and an infinite number of weapons crowd-sourced on the internet…

Other than that, I’ve mentioned before how much I like the NOS energy drink packaging (shaped like a horsepower boosting nitrous oxide bottle) — and I also like the way the NOS tastes, plus there was an IAM/BME member that worked at the factory back when I first discovered and posted positively about the drink which was sort of cool — but today when I was at the store I saw this similarly awesome “Rage” soda bottle, designed to look like a fire extinguisher… Awesome idea!

That said, I’m sorry to report that it’s just horrible, bright red and cherry flavored. I can’t express here just how awful it is. I really wanted to like this soda but couldn’t bring myself to… Sorry…

I read somewhere lately that in the “olden days”, when you’d buy an appliance the manual would contain plenty of technical reference, component listings, schematics and exploded view diagrams, and so on… This is of course a rarity today and I can’t think of a single modern example other than a few things in the open source world (like Arduinos) which arguably doesn’t count. Anyway, I don’t know if I’m going to boycott products without manuals, but do you really have to spray the innards with glue to make me repairing or modifying my own property difficult? It’s like some sort of preemptive vandalism.

At first glance I thought it was Davy Jones from Pirates of the Caribbean but then put it into the context of what Caitlin and I had just been talking about — it’s Dr. Zoidberg, which makes sense, since she’s always excited at the opportunity of watching PG-13 cartoons like Futurama. I guess that is my own private moment, and the joy in it is probably more clear to me than to readers who see my life through the telescope that is a blog, and thus the moment is most appreciated by me, but it’s in these small bubbles of laughter that everything feels wonderful, through and through.

We’ve gone to the public pool the last few days (which was most appreciated after a grueling afternoon of Canadian geography lessons and worksheets), and for the first time she’s passed the deep end test (meaning she can swim in the nine foot deep end, and that she can do it solo). She’s been swimming for a long time, but has never taken lessons, so even though she can swim the length of the pool underwater, until recently when you told her to do it in a front crawl, she had no idea what you were even talking about. However, she’s picked up the front crawl this summer (with some instruction, but mostly by watching others), so doing the two lengths followed by two minutes of treading water was simple. The lifeguard, who I think was a little dubious at first, kept throwing more requests at her, but she met every challenge successfully.

After that we had a ton of fun in the deep end with other kids, mostly diving over and over and over. Nefarious started with cannonballs, then twirls, then belly flops, then deep dives, and even managed to (after seeing me do a few) do a couple of mid-air somersault flips, although at that the lifeguard told us to cool it and go back to cannonballs. For some reason — maybe not enough winter swimming, or maybe damage from just that — I find the cold unbearable, even the relative warmth of an unheated-but-still-summertime-sun-saturated pool, so Nefarious took special glee in dragging me through the fountains and sprayers in the play area next to the pool, which are straight out of the ground pipes and hilariously torturous. But as much as she enjoys the bravado, I think the main reason she does it is that she’s figured out that forcing oneself to be sprayed with the chilly water makes the pool seem so much warmer by comparison. Anyway, it was a great time, and I’m so proud of how much her swimming has improved lately.

While there is much truth in the statement that the physical activity has been far from helpful with my physical reality, I am still quite pleased to say with conviction that as I knew they would, things have improved since Friday.

On one hand, making it to the car was a huge relief, but on the other hand, I wasn’t looking forward to driving home, even if it is only a ninety second drive home. I told Nefarious as we neared the house that I was worried I was going to throw up and she comically pinned herself against the car door, putting as much distance between us as possible, making a hilarious grossed-out face as she did some mental calculations as to whether she should be amused or concerned, quickly settling on both. After a sloppy and skewed parking job, I turned off the ignition to a chorus of “quick, open the door, because Caitlin will be so mad if you throw up in her car!” In a haze, I did just that (the prior, not the dreaded latter), narrowly succeeding in launching past the door sill a psychedelic stream of bile-heavy vomit with a few bits of pear to add another shade of green. I was half collapsed and hanging out, not entirely conscious, held in the car by the Mustang’s old fashioned lap belt, and when I came to a few minutes later I undid the belt and unceremoniously felll out of the car into the vomit, crawled a few feet and collapsed completely, prone.

It took a minute to find the strength to make my arm go through the motion of reaching into my pocket for the keys, which I gave to Nefarious. Without prompting, the first thing that she did was run inside to grab a pillow to put under my head to keep me comfortable. She then got the heavy bags of groceries out of the trunk and put them in the fridge as I lay there. She wanted to know whether to call 911 (something that I’d already considered), but I assured her that I was just sick to my stomach, which forced me, after fifteen minutes of lying there recovering what little I could, to drag myself into the house to avoid being over-ruled on the 911 call. Nefarious helped me to the bed in our front room, which is also the coolest room in the house, and got me some water. She really did take excellent care of me.

I was at once horrified at what she’d just been exposed to, but also very proud at how maturely she handled it and how well she kept her head on her shoulders, to say nothing of how touched I was at the kind and caring treatment. But what really broke my heart and left me not knowing how to respond, was when she said matter-of-factly but with deep sadness, something to the effect of “I know that you’re sick, but when things like this happen I think that you’re going to die soon.” It was everything I could do not to break down in tears. I did my best to reassure her that everything was back to normal by reading and playing cards, both things I could do without having to move, and I think it helped but the doubt and worry was obviously still troubling her. At every opportunity that I’ve felt strong since then, I try and pick her up and do other “feats of strength” to show her that I’m alright, but it’s difficult, because I’m not, and that’s getting much harder to hide, although I hope that Friday stays an anomaly for as long as possible. I grew up with a dad that seemed like the biggest, strongest, most indestructible guy on the planet. That was my experience. I don’t really know what to do, how to handle this, how to talk to my family about these issues… I’m not afraid of dying, and I have to admit that some days I wonder what the value is in having a long drawn out painful death, but then I think of the responsibilities that I have to Nefarious and Caitlin, and I just feel horrible guilt for having those thoughts.

Anyway, tomorrow’s another day, and I’m completely certain that it will be a much better day.

* * *

Oh, and I liked this valedictorian speech that a girl recently gave, echoing many of the points I raised ages ago in BME editorials that quoted all the same John Taylor Gatto et al sources (the original links and formatting are gone, but a couple are still archived here and here).

While I’m posting a inspired video (and not the classic sort that I regularly send Nefarious in her email), I was happy to see Anderson Cooper beating up on political liars, not letting them get away with using the news (let alone the floor of Congress) to spread blatant disinformation… if only this was a regular occurrence, journalists doing their jobs of bringing the public the truth. Now that I give it some thought, I shouldn’t feel inspired by this — it should be the norm. But until it is — and imagine what a different world this would be if it was — a guy can dream, right?

Oh, and I don’t think I mentioned this, but I wanted to give credit to the flikr group from which I’ve been pinching the excellent distressed vignette type textures that you’ve seen here recently. Here’s that link — it’s definitely worth your while to grab them to save yourself some time making your own.

* * *

Anyway, it’s very late and although I’m plenty exhausted I’m not at all tired, I’m going to try and find the sleepiest music I have and hope for the power of lullabies.

I’ve created two versions, one that’s the entire country and the surrounding area, and one that’s a zoom in showing the area between Kabul and Kandahar. Each one has been rendered at 1080p (ie. 1920×1080), so when YouTube’s servers have had a chance to do the conversion, you should be able to watch it at high res if you’d like. I haven’t bothered with music or intro or anything like that because I was just testing, and then, like I said, got bored.

Among other things, we went to the Royal Ontario Museum today to check out the terracotta warriors exhibition and the still excellent after several recent viewings biodiversity displays. Instead of walking, I used a wheelchair, which was an experience that I have mixed feelings about. I know for sure that I hated being pushed, because it made me feel really helpless and low and “less than”, but rolling it myself was enjoyable and it sure was nice to be able to move around without every step being an effort.

On that, I recently added a couple of books on unschooling to my Kindle and have been giving a lot more hands-on thought to treating life as the school. Today at the park Caitlin and Nefarious discovered the carcass of a big fat cicada, so I told her what I knew about them, and when we got home we looked them up on Wikipedia and read the entire thing and then some, discussing the interesting points, and then spent another half hour reading other interesting entries, and lots of worthwhile side paths (for example, “is it louder than a crying baby?”, leading us not just to the comparison, and then various other noisemakers, but some specific use of the technical term “decibels”). It was highly enjoyable for both of us — the joy of learning together — and educationally productive without feeling like work. I feel like it’s something that deserves a great deal more thought, because it felt very “right”.

It was very nice to see our old friend the heron, standing just a few feet away from us in a heavily trafficked pond that I rarely see it in — although I am not sure if it is the same heron that we photographed two years ago (a photo which Nefarious has framed in her room). There were also some teenager ducks.

Finally, I saw (on the web) some very cool upcycling of cheap wood furniture that I want to try out, but I have some fear as to weakening the legs and me crash landing on the floor as Nefarious cackles in glee. There are so many interesting themes one could tackle…

I truthfully do carry the knife for utility, but still, the reason I mention the above paragraph is I realized after the fact that having my phone full of pictures of whittled sticks may well keep me out of jail one day! Haha, although in today’s climate, it could just as easy get me a vandalism charge… In any case, while Nefarious plays at the park, I pick up whatever is nearby and chisel a rather crude face (and perhaps body), looking up occasionally to see her in the distance with her mouth wide open pointing out gaps as she and her friends spend a surprising amount of time discussing their personal encounters with the Tooth Fairy. The funnest part for me though is hiding my creation for a child to discover in the future… The farther in the future the better, because if the carving has had some time to weather so as not to look quite so “fresh”, I think it’s even more able to capture the imagination, and perhaps in life there is no more honorable quest than to do just that.

Unfortunately the found wood is quite hard, so it’s physically beyond Nefarious’s strength to carve (it’s hard enough for me to do with any accuracy), but that didn’t stop her from using marker to make this little voodoo twig of me (thus the beard). Because these sticks pretty much guarantee a serious and bloody injury if she goes at them I think I’ll keep my eyes open for a more blade-friendly soft balsa wood or the like. On one hand I miss the days that you could find craft stores on every block, but on the other hand, these days it’s only a click away… I’m not sure which is better.

Our other unschool-y (as in unschooling — and, question to self: why does the Firefox dictionary default to having “unschooled” but not “unschool”?) activity today was taking a handheld soldering-type blowtorch to small pieces of all the different kinds of styrofoam around the house — various structural computer packing materials, stuff that I think is insulation, ultra-light packing peanuts, and so on — and it was actually quite an interesting experiment. Most of the foams quickly melted into a hard plastic that solidified very quickly. We’d just finished repairing a plastic toy with glue, and next time I’m thinking about welding it with melted styrofoam. The packing peanuts were the most fun, because their ultra-low density made them disappear with pretty much no smoke and no debris other than a tiny grain of green plastic. One of the styrofoams, which almost felt like the material that a thick cold-water wetsuit is made of, was interesting because instead of melting and burning like most plastics, it disappeared and was replaced with a thick shiny coat of tarry oil that seemed to be bubbling, even after the heat was stopped, and then instead of hardening like all the others did, it maintained a flexible rubbery character. Anyway, it was interesting and I may even have learned something.

And no, I didn’t learn that it’s always fun to burn stuff.

I already knew that!

In a way it’s my father’s fault, because when I was a kid, he was always so cheerful about his many adventures and occasional misadventures alike, and so enjoyed telling stories about them. After a case of a lawnmower repair going wrong, instead of instilling in me a sense of careful fear about fire, visiting my father in the burn ward did the opposite. This was doubly reinforced by his subsequent glee at the scars. (Which for all I knew also helped create a love of scars, but that’s a different musing).

A couple close-up photos as well, and I’m thinking you don’t need help identifying the photographer due to the much lower height from which they were taken than Caitlin’s towering window into the world.

Then we read some Harry Potter (working on The Deathly Hallows now), ate some grapes, and got the bedtime process started a bit early. “A bit early” because last night ended up quite late. We’d intended to go to the drive-in, but aborted — to great sadness and tears — due to rain. Instead of going out, we had a home “sleep-over” movie night and Nefarious and I loaded up the couch (which is a big L-shaped sectional with tons of space) with pillows and blankets and watched Star Trek (the most recent movie, which I’m happy to say she greatly enjoyed) followed by the second Three Ninjas kids movie — arriving awake past midnight is still a thrilling accomplishment at age seven.

Tomorrow we’re beginning an experiment in home-schooling, using the month of August to give some hands on experience with the subject to explore the option more seriously. If it goes well, I will write on it in much more detail in the future. If it does not, well, then we never had this conversation, and I’ll trust you to erase the matter from your wetware memory and your software cache.

I love the picture of Caitlin and I, and made it my new profile picture…

Nefarious, who has a fun week coming up visiting relatives (starting tomorrow with a waterslide excursion), insisted that I post this photo here. She was fondly reliving memories about cooking crepes as the cutest two year old ever back when we lived in Mexico, most of all how much fun the flipping is I think, so today she made them for Caitlin and I almost entirely on her own. I did some of the grunt work of mixing the ingredients, but she did everything else — assembling the batter, pouring, cooking, and flipping the crepes in the pan, and all that — on her own. And of course the post-frying carving of a plate of them into this be-hatted skull. It’s a wonderful thing, just as satisfying as a good report card (which I’m happy to say her hard work has earned her), seeing life skills develop and applied.

I’ve set up streaming from my movie/music collection to everything in the house — the PS3, which powers the television, as well as our iPhones and Caitlin’s iPad — so tonight I think we’re going to baptize it by watching “Africa’s Last Taboo,” a horrendously disturbing documentary about being gay in Africa (it’ll get you the death penalty in a dozen or so countries, with their murderous anti-gay movements being well funded by mainstream American churches who can’t get away with executing local white homosexuals). It’s on my must watch list.

That reminds me, I was out for a walk with Nefarious today and some annoying fundies approached us and tried to push tracts into our hands, so I said thanks but no thanks on account of God being a myth (politely though since I don’t want Nefarious to think it’s OK to mistreat someone for their beliefs… even if they are not just ignorant but supportive of great evil) — which seemed to give my daughter the giggles. Because she’s been raised atheist, but with a good knowledge of the stories and faiths of many different cultures via story telling that is expressive of the richness of religious tales, it’s quite surprising to her that anyone would actually believe the stories are real.

Anyway… Other than spending some one-on-one time with Caitlin this week, I’m hoping to do substantial development on a zBrush-esque tool I’m working on for creating height/bump-maps, which I plan on using on my CarveWright CNC router. I haven’t found any good freeware tools that are optimized for bas-relief sculpting, so I’m happy to contribute this effort. You can click to see where I’m at with a screenshot… I won’t embarrass myself by telling you how much time I spent drawing all the icons, nor will I further embarrass myself by telling you just how much I enjoyed that time spent. I actually have a lot of other tasks I need to do also, so fingers crossed that I have the strength to do a satisfying amount.

Download it here: zenmath-add.exe (just run it)

Nefarious helped me debug it, by doing a few sheets of math with an eye for finding errors, and she found a mistake in the sheet below in the way that hints were given for carry digits. That’s been fixed in the download link above.

Feedback on bugs is appreciated, when it’s all debugged I’ll give it a permanent link, because I really do think it’s useful. As always I’m happy to share the source code and will post the final version when the time comes.

Other than that, Caitlin got me some wheatberries and soaked them for me, so I’ve been making delicious salads out of them which I find easy to eat… I’m still having some trouble with nausea and while it’s good that I’ve lost forty or so pounds (not that anyone can tell because having a big beard masks the weight you carry in your face I think), it’s also not so good. I dropped Nefarious off at a friend’s house today and her mother asked me, “how are you feeling”, and you know, I get that the question comes from a kind place but I wish people would never ask that. I don’t like having to lie and say “oh, fine, thank you,” or whatever nicety the social contract demands — it’s not as if I can say “fucking awful, do you mind hitting me on the head with that axe over there so the pain will stop?” But anyway, yummy wheatberry salad, made with said grain, along with cranberries, walnuts, green onion, shredded carrot and radish, a mix of all sorts of beans, lemon, chutney, and various other things. So delicious.

I also whipped out my limited sewing skills (last used to sew clothes in high school) and repaired “Big Dog”. Nefarious thought he was looking a bit thin, so she cut him open to add some more stuffing, but didn’t really get as far in her planning as how she’d close him back up. She has a giant bag of thread/thin rope of different colours, so she found some that matched his fur and I closed the wound. He has a bit of a scar from the surgery, but no longer has a scary hole in his neck.

Plus I gave him a tattoo.

And finally, other than that, a little advice…

No surprise admission: I like driving fast. However, driving fast is largely illegal. So the police camp out at spots where the letter-of-the-law and the public’s driving habits are out of sync when they feel like making some money, and I’ve been caught more than a few times. But what I don’t get is why speeding is aggressively policed, but no one seems to care about smoking? Smoking kills a lot more people than cars, and if we’re going to have laws to protect the public from second hand smoke, it seems reasonable to say that they ought to be enforced. But any day I go to the park or any other no-smoking space, there are always people puffing away, stinking up the area… And the police just drive right on past, ignoring it, and I’m a little confused as to why one law is enforced but the other isn’t.

Today I went to Canada’s Wonderland with Nefarious. This is the first year that she’s 48″ tall, meaning that she can finally go on all the big roller coasters, so we had plenty of fun doing just that, as you can see below. The picture above was also taken at Wonderland, and as you can see, these lovely classy ladies not only are chain-smoking as they’re pushing little kids around in strollers, but the one is and carrying another baby around in their belly. Ah, pregnant smokers. Really nice… And again, even though it’s a no-smoking facility, no one bothers doing anything to stop this child abuse.

The good news about Wonderland today was that the lines were really short, so for many of the rides we only had to wait two or three minutes to get on… I’m not sure that I would have had the endurance to stand in the sun for an hour to get a thirty second high-G beating. We have seasons passes though, which means there’s no need to make the most of a single visit — the nice thing about the passes is that we can go for a couple hours, have fun but not get tired out, and then go again a few days later.

Oh, and while I’m thinking of health issues, holy WOW are there a lot of fat kids these days. When I go to Ontario Place or Wonderland, I’m completely floored by the number of grotesquely overweight children there are, both male and female. When I was a kid, being fat had a stigma to it, and was rare (so on average a given class of thirty kids would have at most one “fat kid” and they’d be “THE fat kid” as a result), but these days it seems like it’s the norm. On one hand it’s great that no one is suffering and living in shame, but on the other hand, how sad that being morbidly obese is so normal that no one notices. But I was just blown away by the number of little boys with huge breasts moving in on two hundred pounds, and ten year old girls with bellys overflowing into a term that should never be applied to children — BBW… It’s really sad, and I don’t understand why the parents haven’t stepped up to help their kids, because the consequences that being fat as a child has on adulthood is profound.

The foundation is the most important part of a building, and the foundation that one builds for one’s life as a child is the most important factor in determining how your adult life will unfold, and in determining the limits of its potential. As has been remarked on many times before, how have we evolved to the point where the generation currently growing up is expected to have a shorter lifespan than its parents? I mean, it’s nothing but slow suicide.

It was a lot of fun though, and I think this week we’ll make a trip to Canada’s Wonderland as well, since Nefarious is now tall enough to go on a majority of the rides… I love roller coasters, and I think she will as well, since thrill-seeking-behavior is so thoroughly encoded in her DNA.

Last night, in addition to the big fight, Caitlin and I went to see Iron Maiden (also at Ontario Place incidentally). It’s really a surreal experience going to see a metal school, because it pulls the strangest people out of the woodwork. I mean, where do all these oldschool metalheads come from? Judging by their real-deal hair, it’s not like they’re just playing dress up for the concert. Security were being dicks at the door — I’d just bought a big mango smoothy at the venue, but outside the security check and they insisted that I throw it away and buy a Molson product inside. But that wasn’t as bad as the guy in front of us, who they told couldn’t bring in his ancient portable CD player (which clearly wasn’t capable of recording, and it’s not as if they were stopping phones anyway). For me, I just waited a minute until they were distracted and had forgotten me, and walked in with my drink anyway. Inside security was mostly taking away kids’ joints, and checking ID of beer drinkers (appropriate since not long after we got there the kid in front of us spent a couple minutes puking).

Anyway, I also did some animation work (entry below this one), although it’s such a time killer that I really need to stop, because I have a pressing need to finish my writing projects which have been on hold since I discovered Pencil (the free software I use for flip-book animation)… I’ve also started working on some home-schooling software that prints out worksheets. It’s nothing special — mostly just something to make sure that my programming skills stay sharp. That said, now that I have an iPhone after years of having bottom-of-the-line junker phones, I kind of feel like doing some programming for it as well.

Other than that — well, there’s a lot other than that, but I don’t feel like writing much, to say nothing of my memory of the week being hazy — I had yet another frustrating visit with the doctor… Frustrating because I feel stuck in limbo again, waiting for the results of tests that were done many months ago. The lab sent me a letter telling me to be patient and that I’m in the queue, not that this does anything but annoy me. The biggest reason that I hate being in limbo like this is that I desperately need to get into a physical therapy program, and it would be massively easier if I could walk in with those results. And it sucks that I, the patient, have to constantly be calling and hounding my doctors to keep the process from stalling… I shouldn’t have to, and more importantly, at the times when I’m at my sickest, I’m not physically or mentally able to do so anyway.

Quite seriously, there are many times when I think I would be better off buying an RV and just spend the rest of my days exploring and living free (I’m sure Nefarious would vote for not going to school — although I would be a far tougher teacher with very high expectations were I to homeschool), and then when the time comes, jump into the Grand Canyon and never be heard of again. Last time I was there, I talked to a park ranger about jumpers and she told me that it’s a regular occurrence, and they often don’t find the body — all they find is a suicide note in a motel.

Here’s a little stop-motion that Nefarious did with some help from me. Unfortunately Youtube cropped off the last two or three seconds for some reason, meaning you don’t get to see the conclusion of the jailbreak… She found doing this more than a little boring, so I doubt you’ll see another from her any time soon (and don’t worry, she watched the end result without the sound of Dr. Octagon)…

And today some of that joy came from having a set of plastic playing cards.